A Short History of English Liberalism Part 3

Hastings was in fact incomparably better than his predecessors, and after the trial had dragged on for more than seven years he was acquitted by the Lords. But the proceedings had established the great principle that morality is to be observed by white races in dealing with black, and that even though forms of government may be different, the objects of government are the same in all parts of the world, the happiness of the governed and not the enrichment of the governor. The impeachment cost Burke fourteen years of unremitting labour. But though he failed in his immediate object, and though the improvement in the methods of Indian government was slow, the permanent effects of his work remained. Burke's speeches were often overcharged, and if {95} Hastings had been as bad as Burke believed him to be, he would have been supernaturally bad. But indignation on behalf of an alien race is not so common that we can afford to spare even its excess. A later generation of Englishmen, reading some of the sorry pages in the history of our modern Empire, may regret the absence from us of Burke's imagination, sympathy, and inexhaustible wrath. Acts of Parliament pa.s.sed in 1772 and 1784 gave the Crown political control over the East India Company, and the complete transfer of the Company's rights in 1858 established the government of India upon a political and no longer upon a commercial basis. Blemishes there are still, but there are few systems of government in the world which are less influenced by the desire to promote the selfish ends of the governors. The transformation of English opinion with regard to India began with Burke.

On the eve of the French Revolution there seemed to be a very good prospect of reforms in the English Const.i.tution. The Catholics had made an actual advance. The Dissenters had every reason to be hopeful. The Tory leader himself had shown sympathy with free election and the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the new industrial districts. But the fate of English liberties lay in the hands of the French Government. If Turgot and the French reformers had had their way, the Revolution might have been averted, or at least mitigated.

The triumph of the French privileged cla.s.ses made reform impossible, and made it certain that revolution would be violent and universal. In May, 1776, Louis XVI, impelled by faction and his bad wife, dismissed the one statesman who could have made absolute monarchy tolerable to the French people. By the end of 1793 he and the Queen had perished on the scaffold, the n.o.bility were dead or in exile, and a French Republic was proclaiming with even greater emphasis than the American the doctrines of individuality and natural right. The shock to established things was terrific. This was not a matter of a handful of colonists in a remote part of the world. It was a whole nation, and that {96} in the heart of Europe, which had not only risen against monarchy but had destroyed it, and with it aristocracy and the Church. Every inst.i.tution upon which political society was based had vanished in the flood, and the French people, not content with establishing new principles at home, were calling upon the common people abroad to do the like, and were announcing their intention of carrying help wherever it was required. It is difficult to imagine in these days with what feelings those who believed in cla.s.s distinctions and privileges and the aristocratic monopoly of government witnessed the triumph of an a.s.sembly which issued this Declaration of Rights.

"I. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.

"II. The end of all political a.s.sociations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

"III. The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; nor can any individual or any body of men be ent.i.tled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it."

The Declaration affords as ample material for criticism on logical and historical grounds as the American Declaration of Independence. But its plain meaning was the same: that the subordination of the individual to the inst.i.tution was at an end, and that everything in politics was to be tested in future by its effect upon human beings, irrespective of their rank, wealth, creed, or occupation, or s.e.x. In a word, it was the source of modern Liberalism.

In England the Revolution was at first regarded with general approbation, or at least indifferent curiosity. To Whigs like Fox and Mackintosh, as well as to Radicals like Price and Cartwright, it was a matter of exultation to see the end of absolute monarchy in France. Even a Tory might view with equanimity the summoning of a French a.s.sembly which bore some resemblance to the English. Even a lawyer might rejoice at the fall of the Bastille, the symbol of arbitrary government, {97} and the negation of the English rule of law. But as the Revolution swept beyond the const.i.tutional forms, when the mob broke loose in Paris, when the King's head was cut off, when the heads of men and women who were n.o.ble in character as well as rank were carried through the streets on pikes, when the property of the Church was confiscated, and when members of the old n.o.bility of the most splendid nation in Europe exhibited their dest.i.tution in every town of England, the bulk of the English people hurried into reaction. If anything beyond the mere excesses of the Revolution was required to turn a timid friend into a frantic enemy, it was the a.s.sembly's proclamation of its intention to help all other peoples to follow its example. There is no people which hates political bloodshed more than the English. There is no people which more stubbornly resents foreign interference in its domestic affairs. Both these national characteristics were offended by the Revolution, and their offence was the opportunity of Toryism. Burke's _Reflections on the Late Revolution in France_ was published in 1791, and gave voice to the national dislike of violent political changes. The book, with its deep reading of human nature, its insistence on the continuity of national growth, and its contempt for those who thought to alter a political society by reasoning in the abstract, was the wisest book which the Revolution produced on either side.

But it was full of errors of fact, and it made no allowances for the horrible suffering which the old system had imposed upon the common people of France. If it expressed the opinions of a wise Conservatism, it was also made the textbook of selfishness and monopoly. Every person who owned property or privilege was roused by it into hatred of any change which threatened to extend the political rights of the majority. The governing cla.s.s marshalled itself to defend its own. From the moment when Burke published his book to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, hardly a single Liberal measure was pa.s.sed into law. The fate of the Dissenters has already been described. Parliamentary Reform fared no better. In 1792, 1793, and 1795 Charles Grey, afterwards Earl Grey, brought the subject {98} before the House of Commons. In 1782 Pitt had been beaten by 161 votes to 141. In 1793 Grey was beaten by 282 to 41, and in 1793 by 258 to 63. The Dissenters were not admitted to public offices till 1828.

The Catholics had to wait till 1829. Parliament was not reformed till 1832.

Nor was the Tory spirit displayed simply in neglect. It was active and vicious. During the long interval between the beginning of the Revolution and the triumph of the Whigs in 1831, the Press was gagged, political a.s.sociations were broken up, combinations of workmen were prohibited, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, public meetings were forbidden or violently dispersed, and large numbers of worthy and respectable men were transported or kept in prison, in many cases without trial. Free inst.i.tutions endured, but they ceased to operate. Liberty was kept, but in chains.

The man who determined the course of this reaction was William Pitt, and though much of its evil must be ascribed to the state of general opinion, his personal responsibility was very great. He seems to have a.s.sumed that failure would follow every attempt at change, and though he was in favour of the Reform of Parliament, of Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, of Free Trade, and of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and was not hostile to the removal of the disabilities of Dissenters, he abated every one of his principles without seriously attempting to put them into practice. He was one of the greatest politicians and one of the worst statesmen England has ever had.

He managed Parliament with astonishing success, and hardly ever used it for a good purpose. His failure to reform the House of Commons increased discontent and made government more difficult. His failure to emanc.i.p.ate the Catholics before the Union with Ireland was the final and decisive cause of the Rebellion of 1798, and his failure to emanc.i.p.ate them after the Union was the chief reason why that measure did nothing to improve the condition of Ireland or its relations with England. His failure to abolish the Slave Trade, when even Tories like Windham were against it, prolonged for twenty years a system of human misery and {99} degradation such as had never been known in any civilized part of the world. His system of finance burdened the country with an unnecessary load of debt. His failure to adjust the customs tariff to the new conditions of a population which was no longer self-sufficing increased distress and discontent with it. His chief enterprise, the war with France, was begun in folly and conducted with incompetence, and it was not until after his death that it was efficiently conducted to a successful issue. The one thing which he did was to maintain a strong central government in the United Kingdom. But to this maintenance of government he sacrificed almost everything for which government exists. "The Pilot who weathered the storm" flung all the cargo out of the ship, and steered her from the high seas into dangerous shallows, from some of which she has not yet escaped.

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CHAPTER IV

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ENGLISH OPINION

The Revolution affected English society in two directly opposite ways. It is unquestionable that its violence drove the majority into hostility not only to Revolution, but to Reform. But many men and women welcomed the triumph of its principles with an enthusiasm which was almost as extravagant as the opposition of the rest. Those who had preached equality in the days of Wilkes and the American War were encouraged to greater zeal, and the bigness of the new shock awakened interest in ma.s.ses of people who had previously been apathetic. The Industrial Revolution had by this time produced much of the social alteration of which some account has already been given, and the artisans of the North offered a fertile soil for doctrines which had previously fallen on barren ground. Political speculation now for the first time attracted the serious attention of the governing cla.s.s. The new thinkers themselves belonged to all ranks, though very few of them were to be found among the aristocracy. They all preached, with more or less ardour, and with a more or less crude application of logic to political conditions, the doctrine that every man had an equal moral right with every other to control his own life. For practical purposes the speculation of these primitive Liberals did not extend beyond male limits. But some, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft was the most conspicuous,[100] even made the same claim for every woman. When only one woman in ten thousand had any substantial intellectual training, it was natural enough that men should give little {101} thought to their political rights. Until women were sufficiently educated to ask for equality in the State, it was impossible that men should think seriously of granting it.

But the French Revolution, though its direct effect on the political condition of women was insignificant, started, in their case as in that of men, a train of events which has borne fruit in more modern times. The emanc.i.p.ation of women from the control of men, which is the most profound of all the social changes of the last fifty years, has been produced by precisely the same changes in social ideas as those which have abolished the political distinctions among sects and cla.s.ses of men. It is only another part of the process of the emanc.i.p.ation of the individual which is called Liberalism.

The most obvious feature of this early Liberal movement is its neglect of economic questions, and its concentration upon the mere machinery of government. The science of political economy was indeed only in its infancy, and Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, published in 1776, had little effect upon practical politicians of any school until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Political argument was therefore conducted in these early stages very largely upon a theoretical basis, and Tories, Whigs, and Radicals contended as mightily about the abstractions of natural rights and sovereignty as the early Churches about the difference between h.o.m.oousion and h.o.m.oiousion. Almost the only practical grievances alleged against the old system were expensive wars and the maintenance of sinecures. The early Reformers, though the doctrine of _laissez faire_ was not formulated until half a century later, in fact believed it. They were in economics what the Whigs were in politics. They hated the interference of the executive, and they would probably have looked upon attempts to alter economic conditions as meddling, which would restrict the liberty of the citizen and increase the already dangerous influence of the Crown.

This indifference, or rather hostility, to economic reforms was shared by all parties alike. Practically everybody agreed that it was a bad thing for Government to interfere with trade, though few went so far as to condemn the system of Protection. {102} Arthur Young disliked Government interference as an economist. "All restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy are bad."[101] Burke declared that his opinion was against "an overdoing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority, the meddling with the subsistence of the people."[102] Adam Smith, in his _Wealth of Nations_ said that "According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to ... I. The duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; II. The duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and III. The duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public inst.i.tutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society."[103] This was the general opinion of the manufacturers, and in 1806 it was embodied in a Parliamentary Report on industrial conditions: "The right of every man to employ the capital he inherits or has acquired according to his own discretion without molestation or obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the rights or property of others, is one of those privileges which the free and happy const.i.tution of this country has long accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright."[104] The aristocracy and the commercial cla.s.ses alike distrusted an interference which restricted their personal freedom.

The Radicals, who professed to be, and were much more alive to the distresses of the labourers and artisans, were hardly less emphatic. "All government," said Dr. Price, "even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried farther than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State. This {103} is what an excellent writer calls 'governing too much.'"[105] "Government," said G.o.dwin, "can have no more than two legitimate purposes, the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community and defence against external invasion."[106] Most of the Radicals were in fact of the middle cla.s.s, and few of them saw things from the workman's point of view. However far they went, they were careful to maintain the rights of property. "The phrase 'domineering rich' is exceptionable," said Major Cartwright, "as it may, by cavillers, be construed into an attempt to excite the poor to invade the property of the rich. It is not by an invasion of such property that the condition of the poor is to be amended, but by such equal laws as would have a natural tendency to prevent injustice, and to benefit every cla.s.s of the community."[107] A free Parliament would allow every man an equal chance of obtaining wealth. Neither Cartwright nor any of his a.s.sociates seems to have considered that, while wealth was acc.u.mulated in the hands of a small cla.s.s, equality, even of opportunity, was impossible without some measure of State interference. What was needed by the working cla.s.s was the removal of taxes upon food and raw materials, a helpful instead of a degrading Poor Law, the right to combine against their employers, and factory legislation.

But the speculators were more concerned to reduce the interference of aristocratic government with the liberty of the middle cla.s.s than to increase the interference of any sort of government with the working cla.s.s, and they failed to see that the workmen's grievances were not the same as their own. A man who was wellnigh pressed to death with heavy weights was to be relieved by an improvement in the ventilation of the torture-chamber.

The Radicals[108] thus, in common with the Tories and the Whigs, ignored economic problems, or a.s.sumed that they were {104} incapable of solving them by political action. But their opinions, so far as they went, were Liberal opinions. They made the individual the unit of political society, and denounced all artificial barriers between ranks and cla.s.ses. In his younger days Cartwright held principles which led directly to Republicanism. In his pamphlet _Take Your Choice_, which was published in 1776, at the height of the American dispute, he said: "How much soever any individual may be qualified for, or deserve any elevation, he hath no right to it till it be conferred upon him by his fellows.... It is liberty, and not dominion, which is held by divine right."[109] The suffrage must be extended to all adult men. "Personality is the sole foundation of the right of being represented; ... property has, in reality, nothing to do in the case.... It is a very fit object of the attention of his representative in Parliament, but it contributes nothing to his right of having that representation."[110] "We might as well make the possession of forty shillings per annum the proof of a man's being rational, as of his being free."[111]

But Cartwright, though a perfect specimen of the logical politician, and reasoning on principles as purely Republican as those of Paine himself, was a member of the middle cla.s.s, and enjoyed, during a great part of his life, a substantial income. He openly opposed the followers of Paine, and at a meeting of the Society of the Friends of the People, which he helped to found in 1792, he carried a resolution in favour of King, Lords, and Commons.[112] This Society contained not only Radicals like Cartwright, but Whig Reformers like Grey and the Duke of Bedford. Eventually, the logicians were squeezed out, and the Society became a Whig organization, the least vigorous of all those which worked for reform outside of Parliament. The best of its members were practical politicians, who concentrated on active and notorious abuses like rotten boroughs and the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of large towns.[113] Grey worked in {105} Parliament very steadily, and other representatives of the Society spoke manfully on occasion in both Houses.

But as a whole it seems to have done little to arouse the feeling of the country, and it was as vigorous in its condemnation of its more active a.s.sociates as in its attack upon the common enemy. Its principles were essentially Whig, and not Liberal. "We profess," wrote Lord John Russell, the chairman of the London Society in 1794, "not to entertain a wish 'that the great plan of public benefit which Mr. Paine has so powerfully recommended will speedily be carried into effect,' nor to amuse our fellow-citizens with the magnificent promise of obtaining for them 'the rights of the people in their full extent'--the indefinite language of delusion."[114] So even Fox, though he said that "government originated not only for, but from the people," and "the people were the legitimate sovereign in every community," yet declared himself "a steady and decided enemy to general and universal representation."[115] Sir Francis Burdett and one or two other Members of Parliament took the purely Radical view.

But so late as 1818, when, after nearly twenty years of heated agitation, Burdett moved resolutions in favour of manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and equal electoral districts, Brougham said on behalf of the official Whig Opposition: "As for universal suffrage, or the doctrine which severed the elective franchise altogether from property, he begged leave to observe that he never had at any time held it as less than the utter destruction of the Const.i.tution."[116] The Whig Reformers were thus distinguished from the Radicals, and as they spoke contemptuously of the extremists, so they were in their turn attacked as lukewarm and time-serving. Even Fox himself did not escape censure, though he was always careful to abstain from recrimination.[117] The real value of the Whigs was that they opposed themselves steadily to all attempts to suspend the ordinary law, to stifle public discussion, and to {106} govern the country by the arbitrary power of the executive. In this cause Bedford and Grey and Fox were heartily at one, and the various Bills for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, suppressing or restricting public meetings, and dissolving political a.s.sociations were always opposed by a compact body of members of both Houses.[118] The few Whigs, who kept their heads in the face of Revolutionary France, aimed at the old Whig objects, the supremacy of Parliament over the executive, and the maintenance of the rule of ordinary law.

When the Society of the Friends of the People had fallen into the hands of the Whigs, Cartwright and Radicals like the Duke of Richmond, Dr. Price, and Horne Tooke found a new outlet for their logical energies in the Society for Const.i.tutional Information, which had been founded in 1780. The members of this Society were infinitely less experienced in practical affairs than men like Grey, and some of their publications show a most pedantic and ludicrous precision of reasoning from abstract principles.

Like all abstract politicians, they despised those who were content to advance in opinion by easy stages. "How," asked Cartwright, "shall we speak of the imbecile efforts of our professors of moderate reform--so much in the nature of moderate honesty!--politicians whose abortive conceptions and Sisyphean labours never can command the respect of Parliament, Prince, or People? Can nothing cure these step-by-step Reformists of their insanity?"[119] Their own doctrine was compressed on one occasion into the following remarkable resolutions:

"1. Representation--'the happiest discovery of human wisdom'--is the vital principle of the English Const.i.tution, inasmuch as it is that alone which, in a State too extensive for personal legislation, const.i.tutes Political Liberty.

"2. Political Liberty being a common right, Representation co-extensive with direct Taxation ought, with all practicable equality, to be fairly and honestly distributed throughout the community; the facility of which cannot be denied.

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"3. The const.i.tutional duration of a Parliament cannot exceed one year."

The question of the ballot was on this occasion left open, and a prize, consisting of the thanks of the Society, was offered for the best essay on its advantages. The justification of the third proposition is a comical instance of the way in which these theorizing politicians were carried away from practical affairs.

"The truth of the third proposition in the Const.i.tution or this Union is made evident by the following, among other considerations:

"1. An Englishman, at twenty-one years of age, enters on his inheritance, whatever it may be. 2. A greater inheritance descends to every one of us from Right and the Laws than from our Parents; on which maxim Sir Edward c.o.ke (in his second Inst.i.tute) remarks, 'Right is the best birthright the subject hath; for thereby his goods, land, wife, children, his body, life, honour, and estimation are protected from wrong.' 3. To no other 'Right'

than that of a People either personally or representatively making their own Laws, whereby they may be 'protected from Wrong,' can this remark of Sir Edward c.o.ke possibly apply. 4. When Election is withholden for seven years, then all who came of age since the preceding election are kept out of their Inheritance and best Birthright. 5. Even supposing the Representation of our Country were in other respects quite perfect, yet septennial Parliaments would still deprive the whole Nation of its political Liberty for six parts in seven of human life; and triennial Parliaments must have a like effect for two years in every three; whence it follows, that Parliaments of any duration exceeding One Year instead of a protection from, would be an infliction of 'wrong'; contrary to the Const.i.tution, against Right, and destruction of Liberty."

This pedantry would destroy itself: by the application of the same principles it could be proved that a General Election was necessary once a month, or once a week, or once a day. But the real objection is that which these _a priori_ Reformers constantly overlooked, the fact that a Const.i.tution is after all only {108} a machine contrived for certain practical ends of government, that it must be arranged upon a basis of convenience, and that infinitely greater hardship could be inflicted upon the country by interrupting trade for one month in every twelve and spending a million pounds in unproductive ways, than by forcing a small portion of the population to abstain from voting even until it was as much as twenty-eight years old.

These doctrines being based upon pure logic, and not upon practical convenience, were naturally made applicable to all peoples without distinction. "All being pure and genuine," said Cartwright, "the result will be, a strict unity of form universally applicable; and exhibiting its subject, political liberty, as evidently a common right and inheritance of every people or nation; for to talk of English liberty, and French or Spanish or Italian liberty, as different in nature is contrary to reason."[120] It is easy to understand why men like Fox and Grey, accustomed to grapple with the affairs of men who were swayed by prejudice, tradition, interest, by everything but reason, were contemptuous of political theories of this sort. No one who has been engaged in active politics can fail to understand that men are infinitely variable, and that what suits one race will not suit another. There was really only one problem to consider. Given a society with a known history, composed of human beings of a known character, and distributed among known conditions, what form of government was best suited to their case? Origin, character, social and economic distribution, and past history, are all different in different peoples, and political inst.i.tutions will inevitably differ also.

The Radicals were far enough away from real life. But with all their incapacity for politics, they performed the great service of preaching the political importance of individuality.

More influential than they were Tom Paine and his followers. These had fewer men of experience in their ranks, they had less respect for existing inst.i.tutions, and they were as bitterly contemptuous of pioneers like Cartwright as the pioneers in their turn were contemptuous of the Whigs in Parliament. {109} Cartwright clung to King, Lords, and Commons, the Established Church, and administration by men of property and rank. Paine was a Republican, a theist, and a social reformer. The one had influence among the aristocracy, the gentry, the manufacturers, and the forty-shilling freeholders. The other was popular with the artisans and tradesmen. But in general habit of mind the two men were very similar. The differences were differences of cla.s.s. Both belonged to the same species.

They were equally dest.i.tute of the historic sense, and equally incapable of understanding that inst.i.tutions must grow and change with society, and cannot be praised or condemned according as, at any particular moment, they do or do not correspond with the needs of the people who work them. Both pushed theory to logical conclusions, irrespective of the course of events in the past or the practical difficulties of the present. Of the two, Paine had more political capacity. He had more genuine understanding of the character of his audience, and his influence was infinitely more widespread than that of any of the older men. Burke's _French Revolution_ drew a volley of books and pamphlets from his opponents. The _Vindiciae Gallicae_ of Sir James Mackintosh was the best of these. But Mackintosh, no less that Dr. Price, Mrs. Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft, was outwritten and outsold by Paine. Of the _French Revolution_ 19,000 copies were sold in twelve months. In the same period Paine sold more than 40,000 copies of the First Part of the _Rights of Man_.[121]

This famous book is marked by many of the vices of extreme opinions. Its reading of events in France, in some of which Paine had taken part, was far more accurate than that of Burke's treatise. Paine avoided the mistake of taking the Revolution to be a mere outbreak of capricious violence, and gave due weight to the intellectual revolution which had preceded it, and to the economic distress which aggravated it. But though he knew France better than Burke, he had not Burke's grasp of the idea of growth, of the necessity of development rather than of reconstruction in politics, and he could not understand that an inst.i.tution, which {110} was now useless or detrimental, might, in an older system, have been necessary to the existence of society. Such phrases as Burke's "chain and continuity of the commonwealth" had no meaning for him. Everything was to be cut off and begun afresh. "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it."[122] "When we survey the wretched condition of man, and the monarchical and hereditary systems of government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of governments is necessary."[123] Paine is here not unlike the surgeon in Mr. Shaw's play, for ever eager to plunge his knife into the vitals of the patient, without knowing either the history of the disease or the chances of its cure. How much wiser is Burke's "I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise const.i.tuted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman."

Paine's prophecies were as extravagant as his reading of history was inaccurate. "I do not believe," he said, "that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe."[124] After one hundred and twenty years Portugal alone has attempted to follow the example of France, and it was eighty years before even France expelled its last despot.

The truth lay midway between the two extremes. Burke was right in theory and wrong in facts. Paine was right in facts and wrong in theory. Paine was deceived by the events of his own time. He had personally a.s.sisted at the making of two new {111} const.i.tutions, and he exaggerated the ease with which others might be made like them. This violent plucking out of ancient loyalties seemed normal, when in fact it was altogether abnormal. In America, separated from the old world and its old habits, the process had been comparatively easy. In France, as subsequent events proved, it was of enormous difficulty. Men who habitually build their houses on the sites of abated earthquakes are not in a day to be twisted out of their habit of submitting to illogical things like kings and n.o.bles and Churches. Nor is it often servility or credulity which produces that submission. In the vast majority of cases it is only that they accept that to which they have been accustomed, and require some outrageous provocation to make them change.

This was incredible to Paine. What was unreasonable was fraudulent, and what was fraudulent to-day had always been fraudulent. "It is impossible that such Governments as have hitherto existed in the world would have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle, sacred and moral. The obscurity in which the origin of all the present Governments is buried implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they began."[125] The obscurity seems a little less dense to us, and the King and the Church appear as necessary in their proper order to the consolidation of society and its advance out of barbarism. To Paine the early king was only the head of a band of robbers, and the early Church was contrived only to maintain him in power by investing him with superst.i.tious terrors. He a.s.sailed monarchy and aristocracy with a variety of scornful epithets: "n.o.bility means No-ability." "t.i.tles are but nicknames." "France has outgrown the baby-cloaths of Count and Duke, and has breeched itself in manhood." "The difference between a republican and a courtier with a respect to monarchy is that the one opposes monarchy, believing it to be something, and the other laughs at it, knowing it to be nothing." "As to who is king in England or elsewhere, or whether there is any king at all, or whether the people choose a Cherokee chief, or a Hessian hussar, for a king, it is not a matter {112} that I trouble myself about." "The House of Brunswick, one of the petty tribes of Germany." "The splendour of a throne ... is made up of a band of parasites living in luxurious indolence out of the public taxes." "Monarchy is the master-fraud, which shelters all others." A torrent of these gibes and sneers at things which to the ordinary man and woman of comfortable surroundings were hardly less than sacred, roused against Paine all that horror and aversion which in our own day has been inspired by Mr. Lloyd George.

But the most disturbing part of Paine's book was not its epithets, but its doctrine. Before him Radicals had argued more or less directly from the a.s.sumption of natural rights that every man is invested at his birth with rights against his neighbours, and that political const.i.tutions must be based upon these rights. The theory of natural rights came from Rousseau, and the French Revolution claimed to be a practical consequence of it.

Paine brought it over from France in its crude simplicity, and preached it more forcibly and more effectively than it had ever been preached before.

It was based on a false historical a.s.sumption. Every account of the creation agreed that men are all born equal, of the same degree, and endowed with equal natural rights. These, natural rights were the foundation of all his civil rights. "Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right fore-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection." The basis of liberty is contained in the first three articles of the Declaration of Rights of the French National a.s.sembly, the whole of which Paine quotes in full and declares to be "of more value to the world than all the laws and statutes that have yet {113} been promulgated." The first of these articles, if true, destroys every one of the distinctions of cla.s.s and creed which were dear to eighteenth-century England. "Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility." It followed from this premise that no one cla.s.s had any right to impose laws upon the rest of the community without their consent. The nation must be the source of sovereignty, and no individual or body of men could be ent.i.tled to any authority which was not expressly derived from it. Monarchy, aristocracy, the Established Church, the territorial system, and primogeniture, everything which gave artificial advantages to one man over his neighbour, must be swept away. Given the first a.s.sumption that all men are born equal, the rest follows as a matter of course.

It is as easy to refute the doctrine as to state it. It is not historically true that men are or ever have been born equal. It is not logically true that a man is born with any rights or can ever acquire any except with the consent of his a.s.sociates. The historical basis must appear absurd to any one who is acquainted with the theory of evolution and the early history of family and tribal organization. The logical basis must appear equally absurd to any one who is acquainted with the nature of a right. It is impossible to conceive of such a thing as an abstract right apart from definite human relationships. A right cannot exist in the air. It cannot even attach to an isolated individual. A right is always a right against some other, and postulates the a.s.sociation of its possessor with at least one other human being. How can we with any propriety speak of the rights of Robinson Crusoe before the arrival of Friday? The powers of Crusoe were at first limited solely by physical considerations. When he took Friday under his protection he acquired certain rights as against Friday, and at the same time Friday acquired certain rights as against him. But this is only to say that the natural power of each to do as he pleased, hitherto limited only by natural forces, was thereafter limited also by certain rules of conduct, recognized by both for observance so long as their {114} mutual relations continued. The extent of those limits could only be defined by their agreement. These are all the rights which any man can ever possess, even in the most complex society. A right is nothing more or less than a defined natural power. It may vary in the degree of its definition. It may be enforced by all the authority of the whole community, and be called a legal right. It may be enforced only by the pressure of the opinion of the community or of a cla.s.s, and be called a moral right. In neither case is it a thing of spontaneous generation. It arises always out of the relations of human beings with each other, and may always be tempered and qualified by the nature of their relations.

Paine's mistake lay simply in using the word "natural" instead of the word "moral." To a.s.sert that a man has a natural right to control his own government is to a.s.sert what is demonstrably false. To a.s.sert that a man has a moral right to control his own government is to a.s.sert simply that in the writer's opinion a man ought to be allowed to control his own government, and the dispute is simply about a particular problem of ethics.

Subst.i.tute the one word for the other in the pa.s.sage above quoted, and what is now a false statement of fact becomes a reasonable, if not an unanswerable, argument. The quarrel between Paine and Burke, so far as it was a practical quarrel and not merely a quarrel about terms, was a quarrel about the precise manner in which certain common ethical principles should be enforced. Government is merely the organization of human beings for certain common purposes, and the structure is to be adapted solely to the execution of those purposes. If a particular scheme means the abuse of one section of the community by another, one of the ends of government, the protection of all the human beings concerned, is not achieved, and the scheme, if possible, should be altered. Once we come to the conclusion, upon ethical principles, that every human being ought to have an equal chance with every other of developing himself, it follows, not as a logical deduction, but simply as a matter of practical convenience, that one cla.s.s ought not to be entrusted with the control of {115} others. A const.i.tution in itself has no merit. Its only value is as a piece of working machinery, and it is to be tested not by the degree of its conformity to abstract principles, but by its practical effects.

Burke himself, in fact, destroyed his whole argument against "natural rights," not as a proposition of logic, but as a basis of political action.

He admitted that men had certain "real" rights: "to justice," "to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful," "to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death." But what is the difference between these "real" rights of Burke and the "natural" rights of Paine? How are these rights created and maintained, but by public opinion and current ideas of morality? And if these, why not others? "It is a thing," said Burke, "to be settled by convention." Tom Paine meant nothing else. But when Burke said, "As to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the State, that I must deny to be amongst the direct, original rights of man in civil society," Paine might have asked in what respect rights to justice and to the fruits of industry differed from rights to control government. If the rules of justice are defined by Government so that it becomes difficult, tedious, and expensive, how is the poor man to exercise his right to justice? If Government taxes the raw material of his industry, is not his right to the fruits of it being impaired? In his _Present Discontents_ Burke had described clearly enough the consequences of absolute power, the corruption of the governor and the oppression of the governed. If government remains in the hands of a cla.s.s, it will inevitably be conducted in the interests of that cla.s.s, and the rules of justice and the regulation of industry will be contrived according to its interests and not according to those of the general community. In other words, the rights of the rest of society, however real, direct, and original, are always liable to be diminished or destroyed by the caprice of their governors. {116} Burke's admissions lead as inevitably to universal suffrage as the false a.s.sumptions of Paine.

It must not be a.s.sumed that Paine was a mere theorizer. So far as the interests of the ma.s.s of the people were concerned, he was the most practical of reformers. Tories and reactionary Whigs appealed to "the glorious Revolution of 1688."[126] Cartwright and the Radicals deduced liberty from abstract hypotheses without considering to what practical uses liberty was to be put. Paine came boldly forward with definite proposals for social reforms, and it was this practical application of his principles which made him to be detested where Cartwright was only despised. It was bad enough to a.s.sail aristocracy. Words could hardly express the feelings with which comfortable people listened to his attacks upon property. These would seem moderate to a generation which has grown accustomed to Socialism, as a creed if not as an inst.i.tution, and his proposals were little more drastic than those of the present Liberal Government. He advocated graduated death duties, old-age pensions, maternity grants, the right to work, and international agreement for the limitation of armaments.[127] It is true that the language of his proposals was anything but reckless. He was far from being an advocate of violent methods. "It is always better to obey a bad law, making use at the same time of every argument to show its errors and procure its repeal, than forcibly to violate it; because the precedent of breaking a bad law might weaken the force, and lead to a discretionary violation of those which are good."[128]

"The right of property being secured and inviolable, no one ought to be deprived of it, except in cases of evident public necessity, legally ascertained, and on condition of a previous just indemnity."[129] This is the language of temperance. But the owners of property have little capacity for reflection when their interests are attacked. They are seldom concerned to examine the justice {117} of any infringement of their privileges, and they find it difficult to distinguish between taxation and spoliation, between appeals to natural justice and the negation of law. Paine's adversaries did not believe in natural rights. But they believed in what were far worse. They believed in natural wrongs. It was monstrous to suggest that all men were ent.i.tled to equal opportunities. But it was quite reasonable that the vast majority should be kept in a situation where they could not be confident even of a bare subsistence. The good cause, if not the logical reasoning, was Paine's. The right to property is, like all his "natural" rights, or the "real" rights of Burke, a moral right, and its extent is to be determined upon the same principles as every other. Violent disturbances of it are bad, as violent disturbances of every right are bad, not because they are disturbances, but because they are violent. There is nothing more essentially vicious in a criticism of property in land or machinery than in a criticism of property in a negro. As Burke said, "It is a thing to be settled by convention."

Paine's suggestions for social reform were of little immediate importance, and it was a hundred years before the first of them, a graduated death duty, was pa.s.sed into law. His value in his own day lay, not in his practical proposals, but in his insistence upon the equal value of individuals in the State. What the Whigs had practised partially and obscurely Paine preached universally and with precision. His _Rights of Man_ was the princ.i.p.al textbook of the new school of politicians, who, by basing their politics upon individuality instead of cla.s.s, eventually transformed the English theory of government. The Reformers found government the profession of a few families of landed proprietors, at the best prevented from active abuse by an imperfect system of representation of cla.s.ses. They made it a thing of trust and responsibility, for which every man must prove his competence by his readiness to act directly for the benefit of those whom he governed. They found it an incident in the lives of men of leisure. They made it an expression of the life of men of all ranks alike. Omitting the false historical {118} a.s.sumption, there is nothing substantially untrue in Paine's contrast of the old spirit with the new. "Government on the old system was an a.s.sumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of society."[130]

These new principles did not appear on the surface of politics until forty years later, and not a single inst.i.tution was in the interval altered in the direction of Liberalism. The Whig Opposition broke into pieces, and the majority joined the Tories.[131] The Church of England found itself for once allied with the Wesleyans, whose Christianity was as much repelled by Paine's _Age of Reason_ as its own aristocratic temper was repelled by his _Rights of Man_. The governing cla.s.s was driven into a paroxysm of fear and rage by Paine's triple a.s.sault on aristocracy, property, and orthodox religion, and every Conservative instinct was roused in its defence. Every Reformer, moderate and extreme, was involved together in one denunciation.

Their opinions admittedly came from France, and every atrocity which had taken place in France was due to those opinions. Voltaire was an atheist.